The king keeps his colonies

August 1776. Six weeks after the Declaration of Independence is signed, General William Howe lands the largest expeditionary force Britain has ever sent abroad and breaks Washington's army on Long Island in a single day. Nine thousand survivors are penned against the East River at Brooklyn, the Royal Navy waiting to enter the river behind them. On the night of 29 August, Washington orders a secret evacuation. John Glover's Marblehead fishermen row the army across all night with muffled oars. At dawn the boats are still crossing in plain sight, and a providential fog settles over the river and hides the last of them. Washington steps into the last boat. Not a man is lost.

In the timeline recorded here, the dawn comes up clean. No fog rises on the East River, and first light finds the boats mid-channel, full of soldiers, in open view of the British lines. Howe's guns come down to the water. The Marblehead men row through it, and some boats reach the far shore, and more do not. By eight in the morning the crossing is finished as a military operation and continues only as a drowning. On the Brooklyn shore six thousand men of the Continental Army ground their muskets in the rain-soaked works. Among the prisoners, standing by the ferry stairs with his army taken around him, is General George Washington.